Ugh, get this 84-scoring trash out of my sight!
Pretty much anyone who pays any sort of close attention to gaming knows Metacritic is a cancer. It hurts game makers because nobody buys anything without an 85-or-above attached to it anymore. It hurts “games journalists” who are under constant pressure from publishers and fans to give everything that’s halfway decent a 9. It hurts gamers who often deprive themselves of unique, exciting experiences just because that Metacritic number isn’t high enough.
Still not convinced Metacritic’s a scourge? Well, how about this — Obsidian Entertainment has had to lay-off 30 employees and cancel a major upcoming title. The fate of the South Park RPG they’re working on is also in question. Why? Because Fall Out: New Vegas didn’t get an 85 on Metacritic, which they needed to hit in order to collect a major bonus from publisher Bethesda.
Just for the record, New Vegas has sold nearly 6-million copies worldwide and has a Metacritic score of 84 on the Xbox and PC and 82 on the PS3. So in other words, 6-mill in sales and the piles of money that come with that don’t matter because Obsidian fell one point short on f–king Metacritic.
Do the folks running Bethesda understand that they’re running a business? That their goal is to, you know, make money? They must not, because they just hobbled a studio that has made them millions in the past and is working on some of their most important upcoming games, over a single Metacritic point. Gah.
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I find this whole story hard to believe … (a) that Bethesda is that interested in Metacritic scores and that (b) Obsidian would tie their bonuses to Metacritic and not, you know, what do you call those things that make you money … oh yeah, sales.
Seems really short-sighted on both ends.
I doubt Obsidian had any choice in whether their bonus was tied to Metacritic. That would have been Bethesda’s decision. Bethesda isn’t unique either…pretty much every western publisher is obsessed with Metacritic.
New Vegas was one righteous good time. Some of the DLC… well, I can live without. But I put New Vegas up on the top shelf alongside the original Fallout 3 and Skyrim, which I finally have played all the way to the end, where 6 or 7 broken quests are all that remain, and radiant quests no longer hold any interest.
Pretty awful to give so much weight to a game rating site, but as one of the many with a glitchy, laggy, and nearly unplayable copy of F:NV for PS3, I say GOOD!
Who gave so much power to metacritic? WHO ARE TEHY REALLY WORKING FOR?
Uh where are the sources? Also New Vegas was better than FO:3 by miles. Most people who complained on Metacritic about it were bitching it used the same engine as 3. To them I say: who gives a fuck, go die.
False. It was a linear (well circular, depending on the route you took to the strip) piece of shit. To compare this hulking pile of garbage to FO:3 is blasphemous! The 84 it got on MC seems spot on, but if people lost their jobs on account of it I’d truly be bummed. Layoffs are never funny.
I’m not sure it was a brilliant strategy to tie the success of your company to a bonus. Homer did that on Christmas that one time and we all know how that turned out.
Um, the fault for this rests solely on Obsidian, or rather their legal team. If the distribution deal ties the bonus to to a value on Metacritic, Bethesda has done nothing wrong by sticking to the terms of the agreement. Obsidian should have looked at that contract and countered with “Well, hey, while we’re at it, why don’t we just go ahead and bring in a drunk hobo and have him play the game and if he gives it two thumbs up we get the bonus?” Because that’s essentially what they did.
Also really poor planning to bank on a “bonus.” A bonus is, by design something extra. And while many people I know plan their lives counting on hitting the max % they can for their bonus, I think it’s ridiculous every time since there can always be that one year where it doesn’t come through.
Why do people keep saying Obsidian decided to tie their bonus to Metacritic? It was Bethesda giving out the bonus. Bethesda owns the Fallout liscense — Obsidian was just the hired gun. Bethesda was the one that tied the bonus to Metacritic. There wasn’t much Obsidian could do about it — it was either agree the the Metacritic scheme or Bethesda would get someone else to do the game.
“There wasn’t much Obsidian could do about it — it was either agree the the Metacritic scheme or Bethesda would get someone else to do the game.”
Um, that’s a choice. Might be it wasn’t a choice Obsidian was thrilled about, but that’s how negotiations work when one side has more leverage than the other. Nowhere did I say Obsidian “decided” to do it. But they most certainly AGREED to it otherwise they had the option to walk from the project. There’s no way around that. Bethesda isn’t the big bad guy in this situation for negotiating from a position of power.
It’s certainly odd to create a bonus structure tied to a review aggregation site, but there a lot of different ways to look at it. Could be Bethesda said “we want to reward you for a GOOD GAME not a game that sells well, and so we’re not going to tie the bonus to units moved. Rather, you need to demonstrate that the game can garner critical acclaim.” And maybe both legal teams settled on an 85 at Metacritic as a subjective metric that they could use as a measure of a level of acclaim.
Sounds like it’s Obsidian who’s stupid, not Metacritic. They should be rewarding their designers for good games, not what a website thinks.
Edit: Bethseda’s stupid, not Obsidian.
Why is Metacritic the bad guy? All they do is compile ever game journal score and average it out. Shit thats like blaming Matt Drudge cause you don’t like the headlines in the NYT.
What you’re really saying is that the reason for Obsidian’s layoffs is the fault of IGN, 1UP, GameInformer, et certa…
I like your articles Nate, but this one misses the mark.
It basically is the video game sites’ fault. Their review systems that cause one to ponder the distinction between an 84 and an 85 score. Their score are completely arbitrary at best and are already a source of contention. Metacritic takes all this nonsense data, compiles it and creates their own score. It might work if everyone use the same scale but the take even a five-point scale and adjust it to a 100-point which causes skewed scores for games.
If you dig even a little deep, you can find all sorts of articles talking about bonuses tied to Metacritic scores.
It’s the publisher’s fault for caring about these numbers more than sales numbers. I’d say the better way to measure for this kind of bonus would be an either/or scenario — you get a bonus if the game gets an 85, or sells more than, say, 3 million copies. But I guess Bethesda knew the game was very likely to sell like hotcakes just based on the franchise, and they hoped using the Metacritic score would mean they wouldn’t have to pay the bonus. And it’s just downright shitty to make something that could affect people’s employment based on something as arbitrary as a Metacritic rating.
Yeah, Brundle, this is why I don’t assign any sort of numeric score to a game. We’re not going to be a part of crap like this.